There has been much debate across the internet post-election regarding the impact of fake news on the election as well as the hearts and minds of the American people.

It should come as no surprise not everyone agrees a particular article is actually fake news. Snopes cautions us to make a clear distinction between bad news and fake news. Bad news lacks journalistic integrity where the reporter attempts to mislead the reader by weaving actual facts into the story along with personal bias designed to appear to also be fact.

In contrast, fake news contains no verifiable facts and is often used as link bait to increase ad revenue on the fake news site.

When KA and I were planning the show, the subject of how we would record and edit the episodes came up. Since we are not physically in the same location and, even though the show is only audio, we wanted to be able to see each other during the recording, we chose Google Hangout as our platform. The problem, unless you use Hangouts On Air, Google doesn't offer a method for recording all participants in the hangout. So after some research and trial and error, I came up with the following steps to record Google Hangout on El Capitan on the Mac in order to publish our weekly audio podcast.

Regardless of the OS I'm using, I spend the majority of my time ssh'd to some linux server somewhere around the globe. Recently I've switched from using Ubuntu as my client-side OS and am now using a MacBook Pro. I have small Mac keyboard and a magic mouse.

I hope fring and skype work this out. It is not good for the users when companies such as Skype don't play well with others. Think "What Would Google Do?" Google wants users to come to their service through any means. Regardless of how we use Skype, Skype is still benefiting from the use.

This Oracle TechCast which comes to us from an "undisclosed location" in Silcon Valley, offers us assurance that Oracle is committed to maintaining the free, open source, GPL'd community edition of MySQL. They have recently released version 5.5 and state that they are hiring within Oracle and will surpass Sun's investment into the MySQL project. Jono Bacon, the Ubutu community manager and author of the book, The Art of Community, offers his insight into how Oracle can foster and support the already vibrant MySQL community.

During my twenty-five or so years of technology consulting, I've witnessed many in-house software development projects. Large or small, too often companies tend to believe their needs are too special for any sort of off-the-shelf solution. The true stumbling block tends to fall into the category of "we've always done it this way". Outdated processes and an unwillingness to change force overworked IT staff to build an in-house solution where feature creep is rampant and the project never meets expectations. At the same time, development costs skyrocket far beyond the cost of even the most expensive off-the-shelf alternative. If a close open source alternative exists, those same developers could work within the community to enhance the project and submit code back to the project for inclusion and benefit both the company and the community.

I have been a user of Synergy for several years. I first learned about Synergy on an episode of Hak5. It is very simple to set up whether the server or client OS is Linux, Mac or Windows. For the Systems Engineer, it is a godsend. As a Synergy user, I am very excited to read that the project has been picked back up and we will begin seeing new features.

There is no question that the h.264 standard is not "free". A group known as MPEG_LA holds the patent and according to Wikipedia, it is free for end users to use until December 31, 2015.
As the Free Software Foundation states, it may be more widely published and implemented as a standard than flash, but it is no more "free". I am most curious to know if Apple stands to gain financially from bullying the entire Internet community into using H.264 rather than flash?

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

He and Amitt also talked about the ability of tying each experience to a point of monetization—at user account creation, users status page and status viewing; but also that the best way is to bring the promotion into the game. He talked specifically about a promotion they ran with FTD where in the game you could buy a virtual boquet; and integrating product placement into the story line yielded he said 3-5x conversion rates. He also was big on two tier currencies; which I understood as a base currency that users mostly earn through time and effort in the game; and a second more mega currency that maps to premium monetization of user actions; and links with more “subscriber” class buyers.